Making The Connection

“Penny, Canadian — Passed away peacefully on Feb. 4, 2013, when the Royal Canadian Mint stopped distributing the copper-coloured coin.

The penny’s demise had been anticipated since March 29, 2012, when federal Finance Minister James Flaherty announced in the budget that his government had decided to phase out the smallest denomination of Canada’s currency.

The Canadian penny traces its origins to 1858, when the then-province of Canada adopted the decimal system for its currency. Initially, it was struck at the Royal Mint in Great Britain. That penny had Queen Victoria on the obverse (or “heads”) side and a vine of maple leaves on the reverse (or “tails”) side.

Dominion of Canada coins were first issued in 1870, but the penny, then made from bronze, didn’t join the family until 1876.

Penny production moved to Canada in 1908, when the Ottawa branch of the Royal Mint opened. Countess Grey, the wife of Canada’s governor general at the time, struck the first penny at the mint’s official opening on Jan. 2. Until 1997, the penny’s composition was at least 95.5 per cent copper.

From 1920 to 1936, the reverse side design featured two maple leaves, but that changed in 1937, when the current maple twig design was adopted. The design was the work of English artist George Edward Kruger Gray, whose initials, KG, appear to the lower right of the maple twig.

For Canada’s centennial year, 1967, the penny’s reverse design featured a rock dove. Since 1858, there have been five different designs used on the reverse side, including a period between 1911 and 1920 when the original vine design was augmented with the word “Canada.” The obverse side has always featured a likeness of the reigning monarch.

From 1982 until 1996, the shape of the penny was 12-sided rather than round.

In 1997, the penny’s composition changed to 98.4 per cent zinc, with the rest copper plating. Since 2000, its composition has been 94 per cent steel.

The year 2006 was a significant one for the Canadian penny, as it reached peak production. More than 1.26 billion pennies were minted that year. The last penny was minted in Winnipeg on May 4, 2012.

The cause of death for the penny was likely the drop in its purchasing power, as inflation took its toll. An 1870 penny would be worth about 31 cents today, adjusted for inflation. In its last year, one penny was costing the government 1.6 cents to produce. With the penny’s passing, the government expects to save $11 million a year.

The Canadian penny is pre-deceased by the Australian (1911-1964), New Zealand (1940-1989) and Irish (1928-2000) pennies. It is survived by the American penny (1793- ) and the British penny, its royal and ancient ancestor, which dates back to the seventh century.

The penny will be missed by the other members of the Canadian coinage system, which are now expected to be more in demand. It will also be mourned by the 28 per cent of Canadian adults who told the Angus Reid polling firm in January 2013 that they disagree with the government’s decision to take the penny out of circulation.

Canadians with pennies to spare are asked to call at banks and other financial institutions so that their pennies may be taken out of circulation and the metals recycled. But those who are not quite ready to bid farewell to the dearly departed coin can continue using them — although not all businesses may accept them.

That is up to individual businesses to decide, but the government recommends rounding the total bill to the nearest .05 or .10. The penny will retain its value indefinitely.

In lieu of flowers, donations of pennies may be made to Canadian charities.”

In Carleton Place, the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum has made it known that it would be happy to accept donations of pennies.

I’d love to hear what your stories are about the penny. Just use the comment section below.

I wonder how the first immigrants to this area said that in Gaelic? Gaelic was the language of choice when they arrived in 1816 and well into the mid-50’s, but by the mid-1880’s only a handful of people would be speaking Gaelic in this area. English became the language of choice. Below is an article dealing with the origins of the Ottawa Valley Twang (which we call the Lanark County Twang), and the ethnic diversity of the Ottawa area, by Gavin Taylor from centretownnewsonline.ca. Centretown News is produced in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, which has been studying this in their linguistics department.

I wonder if anyone in the Carleton Place-Beckwith-Mississippi Mills area has any handwritten correspondence in Gaelic from the 1800’s? Now that would be a memory to share!

History has sewn a colourful ethnic quilt

By Gavin Taylor from centretownnewsonline.ca

If you ever find yourself in a small Ottawa Valley town, don’t be surprised if you hear echoes of Ireland in the voices of old folks.

“Let’s give’er a go,” they might tell you in a brogue as thick as corn soup.

“Let’s go up the line by shank’s mare; I think this way is better n’r that one.”

The distinctive Ottawa Valley twang, with its twisted vowels and idiosyncratic expressions, is a reminder that the culture of the region was shaped by several waves of immigrants who settled in the valley during the 19th century.

More than half the people who lived in the Ottawa Valley in the mid-1800s were immigrants

By comparison, only 18 per cent of Canadians were born abroad in 2001 — the highest proportion of immigrants since the 1930s, but small potatoes compared with the massive immigration levels of 150 years ago.

Since the 1970s, researchers at Carleton University have been recording the varieties of English spoken in the valley.

The researchers have so far identified several old-world dialects rooted in Scottish, as well as traces of American English, German, Scots Gaelic, and a Polish dialect known as Kashubian.

But the most important source of valley speech is Ireland.

“In rural areas, there was a sea of Irish-influenced English, with little islands of other groups,” says Ian Pringle, a Carleton University linguistics professor who helped lead the project.

From the 1820s to the 1880s, English-speaking migrants to the valley were overwhelmingly Irish: in some townships, as much as 90 per cent of the residents traced their ancestry to Ireland.

The first census after Confederation showed that the Irish were the largest ethnic group in Ottawa, representing almost 39 per cent of the total population. By comparison, the proportion of Irish in cities such as Boston, New York and Montreal hovered around 25 per cent for most of the nineteenth century.

Bruce Elliott, a Carleton professor who heads the university’s Centre for the History of Migration, says that most English-speaking migrations to Ontario during this period came from the Celtic fringe of the British Isles.

“In some rural areas of the valley, English were as rare as hens’ teeth,” he says.Before 1815, most of the migrants to the valley were Scottish. By the 1820s, Irish families — typically “poor-to-middling farmers” who crossed the Atlantic in search of land — had become the largest immigrant group in the region.

There was also a steady migration of French-Canadians to the valley in the 19th century, chiefly from parishes west of Montreal. Elliott says French migrants typically worked in lumber camps in the winter and cultivated garden plots along the riverside during the summer.

Philemon Wright, the entrepreneur who oversaw the construction of the Rideau Canal in Hull, hired French-Canadian labourers instead of the Irish because he thought they were more “docile” workers, Elliot says.

French and Irish Catholics in Ottawa were clustered in Lowertown in the late 19th century — early Irish immigrants to the region were largely Protestant, but the number of Catholic migrants grew steadily over the course of the century.

A handful of smaller ethnic groups also settled in the city in the late nineteenth century, most of them finding a niche in Ottawa’s retail trades.

Several families from southern Italy found a home in the Preston Street area — then a suburb — and one Greek person in Ottawa was recorded in the 1871 census. A number of African-Canadians worked as street vendors at the turn of the century. Moses Bilsky, the first Jewish resident of Ottawa, arrived in 1857, and the first synagogue in the city was built in 1892.

Migration to the Ottawa region tended to be “ethnically and religiously biased” at this time, says John Taylor, a Carleton University history professor, who has written extensively about Ottawa history.

Immigrants tended to be clustered into ethnically and religiously homogeneous groups that were fleeing economic or political hardship in Europe. But in the early 20th century, Taylor says, the character of immigration began to change.

The lumber industry — the magnet that drew migrants to Ottawa in its early years — fell into a slow and steady decline after the First World War. At the same time, the public service expanded rapidly: the number of government workers in Ottawa grew from about 1,000 in 1900 to over 30,000 by the end of the Second World War.

The public service tended to attract educated professionals from other parts of Canada.

“They were professional people moving toward economic opportunity, not away from political hardship,” Taylor says.

One of the consequences of this migration was that the ethnic character of Ottawa became increasingly similar to the rest of the country — by the 1940s, Irish-Canadians represented less than one-sixth of the city’s population.

The “Valley twang” that inflected rural speech in nearby areas virtually disappeared in the city, as public service workers increasingly spoke a standard version of Canadian English.

While some government workers remained clustered in ethnically and religiously homogeneous neighbourhoods, high-ranking public servants tended to move to Sandy Hill regardless of their ethnic background, Taylor says.

The growth of the civil service has slowed since the 1970s, but the high-tech sector has continued to draw educated professionals to the city. Like civil servants, computer engineers are migrants who come to the city for economic reasons and who tend not to cluster in ethnic neighbourhoods.

But since the 1970s, Taylor says, a new wave of immigration has been patterned along ethnic lines.

As Canada’s immigration and refugee laws were liberalized, families fleeing ethnic or political strife came to Ottawa in increasing numbers. Thousands of Lebanese have migrated to Ottawa since 1975, when a bloody civil war began in their country. Since then, Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, Somalis, and other groups escaping persecution and war have made their homes in Ottawa.

The result, Taylor says, is that Ottawa is more ethnically diverse than ever before: English remains the most commonly spoken language in the city, but allophones outnumbered francophones in the 2001 census.

The history of these successive migrations—Irish migrants in search of lands, public servants in search of a career, and Asians and Africans in search of freedom—has made Ottawa a patchwork of distinctive neighbourhoods, some based on social class and others on ethnic identity.

“We really do have a community of communities here, more than in other places,” Taylor says.

Thanks to centretownnewsonline.ca

Centretown News is produced in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Vast differences exist between living conditions today and those of former Ottawa Valley generations. There are also some perhaps surprising resemblances. Some of these contrasts are brought to life in the files of this district’s long-established weekly newspapers. One of the more completely preserved, with volumes extending from the 1850’s , was published in Carleton Place. Its advertising columns offer one means of viewing almost at first hand some of the past ways of life of this region.

A few of the local advertisements of yesterday are recalled to view here. They are taken in abbreviated form from the Carleton Place Herald at the period of its first publisher.

Advertising Rates

The Lanark Herald will be published every Friday morning, at Carleton Place by James C. Poole. Subscription terms 10 shillings per annum in advance, or 12s.6d. if not paid until after six months. Rates of advertising – 6 lines or under, 2s.6d., and 7 ½ d. for each subsequent insertion; 7 to 10 lines 3s4d., and 10d. for each subsequent insertion; above 10 lines 4d. per line, first insertion, and 1 d. per line for subsequent insertions. Job printing executed.

Barter Economy

One Thousand Sheepskins Wanted – Also all descriptions of Furs and Skins. Fresh Teas and Tobacco given in exchange. James McDiarmid, September 27, 1850.

Indelicate Letters

Notice to Correspondents. We decline to publish the letter of Anti-Bed-Bug, as it contains expressions which we consider indelicate and therefore unfit for our columns. – December 13, 1850.

Gaelic Kirk

Died. At the Manse, in Beckwith, on Friday last, in the fiftieth year of his age, the Reverend John Smith, Minister of the Kirk in Beckwith Township. For seventeen years he has diligently and faithfully discharged the duties of his office. Mr. Smith had been in the habit of officiating both in English and Gaelic. The deceased leaves a wife and six children – April 25, 1851.

Horse vs. Cow

Carleton Place Debating Club. The question for last week, “Whether the Cow or the Horse is of most advantage to mankind,” was decided in favor of the Cow. The question for next week is whether the application of Steam or the invention of the Printing Press is of most advantage to the world. A vote of thanks was given to Mr. Johnston Neilson for the able and eloquent address with which he favored us. – Bennett Rosamond, secretary, May 8, 1851.

Jane & Co’s. Oriental Circus will exhibit in Franktown on Saturday August 9 – at Perth on August 8 and at Richmond on August 11, 1851.

The Company on entering Town will be preceded by the Georgeous Band Car drawn by Eight Syrian Camels. Feats of Horsemanship and Contortionism. Magnificent Oriental Pageant. Admission 1s.3d. Doors open at 2 and 7.

Chest of Tea

Lost, by the subscriber on Saturday November 29, 1851, on his way from Bytown to Lanark, A Chest of Tea, marked with the initials of James and Holmes Mair. Any person leaving the same at Smith’s Hotel, or information leading to its recovery, will receive a suitable reward. – James Forgie.

Moulders Apprentice

Wanted. A young man of steady industrious habits, as an apprentice to the Moulding business. – Samuel Fuller, April 5, 1852.

Aged 103

Died, in Ramsay, on Saturday June 5, 1852, Mr. John Griffith, aged 103 years.

Notice. The Municipal Council of the Township of Beckwith, at their meeting held April 25th last, decided that all Fences on the public highways in the Township and on streets in Franktown and Carleton Place be removed to the full legal breadth; and that Pathmasters shall prosecute for neglect or non-compliance. – Ewen McEwen, Clerk. Franktown May 5, 1854.

Advertising Medium

Notice to Advertisers. The large circulation of 2,500 to which the Herald has now attained, renders it a valuable medium. – September 12, 1854.

Smart Girls

Wanted. At the Herald Office, two Smart Girls, to learn to set Type, fold and address newspapers; fold, stitch and cover pamphlets, etc. Good wages will be given – June 28, 1855.

New Tannery in Appleton! The subscriber will pay in cash $6 per 100 pounds for any quantity of Green Hides! Delivered at the Tannery, or will pay the Highest Market Price going during the Winter. – Peter & John Cram. Appleton, November 11, 1856.

Man-Traps and Spring Guns

The Subscriber Hereby forbids any person Trespassing on his property, being the west half of Lot 23, Concession 6, Ramsay, because from depradations thereon committed he has been under the necessity of placing Man-Traps and Spring Guns. Any person thereby injured will have himself to blame. John B_____; Ramsay, December 10, 1857.

Mammoth Camera

W. R. Godkin would announce that he has set up his apparatus for a few days at Lavallee’s Hotel, Carleton Place. He has a mammoth camera, expressly for taking side-light pictures. He is now taking Pictures such as Melan Types, Cameotypes, Photographs, Sphereotypes and Ambro types. He has a new quick-working camera for all kinds of weather. Mrs. Godkin is alsto taking likenesses at the residence of Trueman Raymond, Almonte. – January 7, 1858.

Extensive Auction

Lothrup’s Annual Auction Sale will commence at Carleton Place on January 12, 1858 at the Hotel of Mr. Lavallee, when will be opened for sale, an extensive assortment of goods consisting in part of 120 Chests Tea, 10 Kegs Tobacco, 50 bags Almonds, Walnuts and Filberts, 30 Boxes Raisins, 25 Boxes Pipes, 10 Boxes Starch, 20 Boxes Blue; also 30 cases dry goods suitable for the Season amounting to nearly £10,000 which must be sold.

Trotting Match

A Trotting Match will come off February 3, 1858 at Mr. Nicholas Dickson’s Landing on the Mississippi River near Carleton Place. One mile heats for any horse owned in Ramsay, Drummond or Beckwith, for one set of Cutter Harness with $20 for the first class horses, and £2 for the second class horses under 5 years. Entrance Fee 5 shillings; Judges Abraham Code, Innisville; John Wilson, Ramsay; John Roberts, Beckwith.

Good Old Corner

John Sumner having leased the premises owned by Robert Bell Esq. and lately occupied by Messrs. Campbell & Morphy, will reopen the same January 21, 1858 with and entirely new stock of Dry Goods selected by himself during the last season when in Great Britain. – No Liquors will be sold on the premises except High Wines by the Cask, any quantity of which he will sell low for cash only. Come and pay a visit to the good old Corner and remember your old Friend.

Six Months Credit

We the undersigned merchants hereby give public notice that, in order to shorten the length of credits that are given, their terms will be: Accounts to become due and payable on the 1st of August and the 1st of February in each and every year, and that interest thereafter will be charged until paid. May 1st, 1858.

The ‘Old Favorite Miller’ has left the Victoria Mills (Almonte) and is now in Carleton Place Mills where he can give the greatest satisfaction to the public. – Hugh Boulton, September 2, 1858.

Furniture and Coffin Makers

Owing to my absence from Carleton Place for a time, Mr. John Hogg has been employed to conduct the Cabinet Business formerly carried on by me in this place. His experience in Montreal, Toronto and Perth and thorough knowledge of Cabinet making will enable him to produce the newest styles and best of workmanship. As Undertakers they will as usual be ready to wait on those who may require their services. – Wm. J. Bell & Co. April 7, 1859.

Liquor and Groceries

Look Here! Liquors and Groceries – Stock consists of Champagne, Wine, Brandy, Rum, Spirits, Scotch Malt, Old Tom, Gin, Proof Whiskey, High Wines, by the barrel or otherwise, Lemon Syrup and Beer, and Quite an assortment of groceries. Cash or Farmers Produce taken in Payment. – William Kelly, June 13, 1859.

First Railway

First Arrival by Railway Direct to Carleton Place! Teas, Teas, part of the Cargo of the Ship ‘Gauntlet’, from China, 112 Boxes and 48 Catties – Also a large stock of Harvest Tools – Also by the same conveyance a further supply of fancy and staple Dry Goods and a very full assortment of Shelf Hardware, Crockery, etc. – A. McArthur, June 30, 1859.

Notice is Hereby Given that Malachia McAuliffe ran away from this office before the end of his term of apprenticeship, and that any person hiring or harboring him will be prosecuted according to law. – Herald Office, January 2, 1860.

Deer Hounds $25

Deer Hounds for Sale. A few first rate Hounds, well trained to deer hunting. Price £5 each. – Herald Office, January 6, 1860.

Some of this district’s law enforcement officers and ways of caring for indigent persons are recalled to view in this installment of a series of records of former local social conditions, which concludes with a brief glimpse of work and leisure in Carleton Place’s distant past.

Law Enforcement

The constables who assisted the sheriffs of the judicial district of Bathurst and of the later counties of Lanark and Renfrew in maintaining the law were once part time officers. Sheriff of the two united counties from 1852 to 1866 and of Lanark County from 1866 to 1903 was James Thompson. His predecessor for ten years had been Andrew Dickson of Pakenham. Sheriff Thompson, first editor and one-time owner of the Perth Courier and county sheriff for over fifty years, lived until 1912 and the age of 100.

Local magistrates of the district at the middle period of Andrew Dickson’s regime numbered forty-three, three at present Renfrew county points and forty in the Lanark area. Beckwith township’s magistrates in 1846 were Robert Bell, James Conboy, Robert Davis, Peter McGregor, Colin McLaren and James Rosamond. Prominent names of magistrates in other townships then included John G. Malloch, Alex McMillan, Roderick Matheson, John Haggart and John Bell, all of Perth; John Balderson of Drummond, John Hall of Lanark, James Shaw of Elmsley, John Lorne McDougall of Horton and Alex. McDonell of McNab. Magistrates of Ramsay township at the same time were Wm. Houston, Wm. Rae, Wm. Wallace, James Wylie and W. G. Wylie.

Part Time Constables

Constables appointed for Lanark and Renfrew counties for the depression year of 1858 at the spring General Quarter Sessions of the Peace numbered one hundred and thirty-two. There were twenty-one for Drummond township including Perth, nineteen for Beckwith including

Carleton Place, nine for Montague including Smiths Falls, and numbers from two to nine for twenty-four other townships. Including some long-lived citizens and sons of district pioneers, the constables appointed for Beckwith township an even one hundred years ago were –

Joseph Bond and Alvin Livingston were among the longer-term constables of Carleton Place’s village days. Alvin Livingston became local full-time constable when appointed in 1885 at a salary of $350 a year as “Chief Constable, Street Commissioner, Collector of Young Man’s Statute Labor Tax and Sanitary Inspector.” He had served in an earlier seven year period as constable and lock-up custodian at a $60 a year salary. Occupant of the same post of chief constable for the lengthiest period, dating from about 1894, was Hugh MacConachie Wilson, with his once familiar greeting to street-loitering youngsters, “Weel noo, b’ys, ye’d better be movin’ an.”

County Jail

Some of the kinds of century-old criminal charges which led to jail confinement are seen in a list of the offences alleged against the occupants of the united counties jail at Perth at one time in 1862. Its prisoners at this time, grouped by kinds of offences charged, were – breach of indenture by leaving his master, 7; theft or larcency, 5; murder, 1; assault with an axe, 1; concealing birth of a child, 1; lack of bail, 3; and vagrancy, 3. Including an additional six confined as mentally ill, the jails inmates were eleven men and sixteen women. The united counties jail of 1862, then about to be vacated in favour of a new structure, was a small two storey bastille with stone walls of a thickness of almost three feet. A barricade of brick, elm and oak composed the second storey floor.

A generation later a similar number of Lanark county occupants of the jail at Perth, mostly “tramps sent in from Smiths Falls and Carleton Place”, included such prisoners as a man charged with stealing a horse and buggy, and “a boy twelve years old, a boot-black and a very cunning youngster, awaiting trial for stealing a gold watch and fourteen dollars.” (July 1898).

Indigents in Jail

Care of Lanark County’s nineteenth century aged indigent residents without family or other private means of support was provided by the available public shelter, the county jail. There a few respectable elderly citizens without friends or money could be housed and fed and classed as vagrants. The Grand Jury report of inspection of this institution for imprisonment of alleged criminals related in part in December, 1880:

“The Grand Jurors for our Lady the Queen, have examined the jail and they find it in a very satisfactory state. There are only two persons committed for crimes and these are of a comparatively trifling character. We are glad to find there was only one insane person confined in the jail. The rest are aged persons who have been committed under the Vagrancy Act. Mr. Kellock who has filled the office of jailer for the last thirty years has resigned.”

The Lanark County House of Refuge was opened formally in 1903 when public figures of the county invited to speak at the ceremony, including Lanark’s members of Parliament, Hon. J. G. Haggart of Perth and Bennett Rosamond of Almonte, provincial members W. C. Caldwell of Lanark and Lt. Col. A. J. Matheson of Perth, Senator F. T. Frost of Smiths Falls and former provincial member Dr. R. F. Preston of Carleton Place. The disappearing old order is seen in a Carleton Place editorial comment on the death of two residents of the county, one of Beckwith and the other of Drummond, in 1901 in the county jail. Like others before them, they had been consigned to spend their last years in jail as provision for their maintenance in their helpless old age.

“What better arguments do our County Councillors want to warrant them in proceeding with the House of Industry than deaths in such circumstances? Poverty, from whatever cause it comes, is not a crime. The only crime of these two elderly citizens was their poverty, yet note their obituaries.”

Hospital Proposals

A revolutionary plea for state support for the building of hospitals had been offered by the Carleton Place Herald in its first year of publication. Its young editor of over a century ago suggested: (Feb. 7, 1851)

“Public Hospitals – The want of hospitals for the indigent infirm in this part of the Province is beginning to be felt as a serious inconvenience. It has become a pretty heavy tax on the benevolent part of the community to be obliged to support those who are unable to support themselves. We would therefore suggest the idea that the Provincial Legislature enact that a sum equal to that raised for the Lunatic Asylum should in like manner be raised for the erection and support of three hospitals, to be situated at the most convenient points in the province.”

Sixty years later the building of a hospital at Carleton Place was proposed and discussed at a Town Hall public meeting held in 1910. William Thoburn outlined the origin and growth of the Rosamond Memorial Hospital at Almonte. Dr. Bruce Smith of Toronto, Inspector of Hospitals, attended and estimated the 1910 cost of a suitable building and equipment at $1,000 a bed, and the cost of annual maintenance in a town of the size of Carleton Place at $3,500 to $4,500 a year. With local capital being invested in industrial expansion of value to the town, including a hydro electric plant and foundry and woolen mill enlargements, and with installation of an expensive municipal waterworks system in prospect, it was decided not to duplicate the facilities of available neighbouring hospitals.

Earning a Living

In ordinary ways of earning a living, the nineteenth century’s old days seem by present standards to have been for most people a perennial struggle for subsistence unlike anything known in Canada’s recent decades. Supported by its farming background, a sturdy race was able to survive independently and commonly to enjoy its life through intervals of moderate prosperity and recurrent times of industrial and trade unemployment, widespread bankruptcy and meager existence; with little organized assistance for its physical and social casualties. There was another side to the conditions in which some of these generations gained their livelihood. It is found in a simpler, less hurried and now generally unacceptable way of life. A glimpse of its ending is seen among recollections written some seventy-five years ago by George Lowe, a seventy year old resident of Carleton Place: (July 1884)

“This day twenty years ago I came to Carleton Place, near the close of the Civil War. At that time property was of little value. I took charge of the railway station. The only industries in the place were the grist mill, run by Mr. Bolton, Allan McDonald’s carding mill, Brice McNeely’s tannery and the saw mill run by Robert Gray, with one circular saw. David Findlay’s foundry was just starting. The lead mines were about closing down then. Twenty years ago it may be said there was no such thing as employment here for anyone and, strange as it seems, no one seemed to wish for work. Their wants were few, and those wants seemed to be soon supplied. Smoking around, a good deal of fishing on the river, and a little loafing about the taverns, put in the day. One day was the history of another. Living was cheap then, but when those public works started – saw mills, wollen mills, etc. – then the whole place wakened up, and there has been no more industrious race than ours. From the progress of this place in the last twenty years what shall it be at the end of the next twenty.”

About seventy-five years ago, Carleton Place reached the speediest single period of its growth. The present instalment of a summary of events in the town’s youthful years tells briefly of some of the developments that were in the foreground seventy to eighty years ago. It reaches the period of the first childhood recollections of this district’s present elder citizens.

The selection of Carleton Place at his time by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company as a divisional and repair shop point added a third main industry to growing textile and lumber businesses. Other principal manufacturing industries here, notably the making of stoves and machinery and grain milling, were all expanding. Revolutionary discoveries in telephone communication and electric lighting and in new types of industrial machines were being put into use in this area.

Building construction and the number of the community’s residents doubled within about five years. At the end of the decade, Carleton Place, with a population approaching only 4,500, was second in size to Ottawa alone in the Ottawa Valley. On the main line of the new railway to the west coast Carleton Place was the largest community between Montreal and Vancouver with the exception of Winnipeg. While the Carleton Place of later years may be found to have increased in wisdom and prosperity as measured by its way of life, its stature as rated by the conventional yardsticks of population and of total commercial activity has remained with relatively little change.

Working Hours

1880 – The idle Hawthorne woollen factory was bought by James Gillies of Carleton Place from its original owner Abraham Code at a reported price of $16,400.

A one hour strike fro a shorter working day by about fifty men at Peter McLaren’s sawmill was unsuccessful. Working hours continued at thirteen hours a day, from 6 a.m to 7 p.m., and twelve hours on Saturdays.

Lawsuits were under way between the rival sawmill owners here, Boyd Caldwell and Peter McLaren, based on McLaren’s efforts to exclusively control the passage of logs down the Mississippi at High Falls and other points.

The first annual regatta and sports day of the Carleton Place Boating Club was held at Carleton Park (Lake Park), featuring sailing, rowing and canoe races, the Perth band and baseball team, and oarsmen from Brockville and Ottawa. Its evening events on the river in Carleton Place were a promenade concert, an illuminated boat dispaly contest, fireworks and a balloon ascension. The Carleton Place brass band wearing new uniforms rode in a large carriage drawn by four horses to a concert and ball in Newman’s Hall which lasted until morning.

Indian Camp

1881 – St. James Anglican Church was rebuilt, the present stone structure replacing a former frame building. The building contractors were William Moffatt and William Pattie. Chairman and secretary of the building committee were Colonel John Sumner and Dr. R. F. Preston. The Rev. G. J. Low succeeded the Rev. G. W. G. Grout before the building was completed.

John Gillies of Carleton Place bought the McArthur woollen mill at the present Bates & Innes site from its first owner Archibald McArthur. The reported price was 40,000. W. H. Wylie, lessee of the McArthur mill, bought the Hawthorne woollen mill from its new owner James Gillies at a price reported as $19,000.

Several parties of Indians were encamped late in the year at the east side of the town and frequented the streets daily. An Indian war dance was held at a local residence.

Railway Shops

1882- A new railway station was built at the junction of the two lines here. Exemption from municipal taxation was granted for the C.P.R. workshops being moved to Carleton Place from Brockville and Prescott. Major James C. Poole (1826-1882), Herald editor, predicted the town was “about to enter upon an era of advancement and unparalleled prosperity.”

Boyd Caldwell & Sons river-men, when their log drive was blocked by Peter McLaren’s dam at the foot of Long Lake, cut a passage through the dam under claimed authority of the Ontario Legislature’s Rivers and Streams Act, which had been reenacted after its disallowance by the Dominion Government. The ten thousand logs reached the Carleton Place mill in good condition after having been delayed three years en route. Peter McLaren’s assertions of exclusive river rights which had been rejected by the Ontario Supreme Court were sustained by the Supreme Court of Canada. The Caldwell firm appealed to the Privy Council.

Sawdust had become a local furnace fuel, according to Mr. W. W. Cliff, Central Canadian publisher, who reported : Messrs. Wylie & Co. use about fifteen cartloads per day, the machine shop about four, and Mr. Findlay about one. The sawmills of course regard it as their staff of steam life.

River Rights

1883 – The Bank of Ottawa opened a branch at Carleton Place, located on Bridge St. near Lake Avenue, opposite the Mississippi Hotel, with John A. Bangs as managaer.

The town’s leading hotel, the Mississippi, was sold to Walter McIlquham, formerly of Lanark, by Napoleon Lavallee at a price reported at $9,400.

In the Mississippi River strife between the two lumbermen whose principal mills were at Carleton Place, the Ontario Rivers and Streams Act was once more disallowed by the Dominion Government under Sir John A. MacDonald and was again introduced by the Ontario Government under Sir Oliver Mowat. The last disallowance held fifty thousand Caldwell logs in the upper Mississippi near Buckshot Lake and forced the Caldwell mill here to remain idle.

The James Poole estate sold the Carleton Place Herald, founded in 1850, to William H. Allen and Samual J. Allen ; and sold the family’s large stone residence at Bridge Street and the Town Line Road to David Gillies, son-in-law of James Poole. William H. Allen continued publication of the Herald for sixty years. David Gillies, original partner and later president of Gillies Brothers Limited of Braeside and member of the Quebec Legislature, maintained his home here until his death in 1926. Its site was the place of residence of six generations of the Poole family.

Divisional Point

1884 – Carleton Place became a railway divisional point. A result was an expansion of the town’s population and of its commercial activities. A large railway station addition was undertaken.

The McLaren-Caldwell lumber litigation ended with a Privy Council judgement upholding the Caldwell claims for public rights for navigation of logs throughout the length of the Mississippi River.

To make way for the building of a new flour mill the John F. Cram tannery and wool plant was removed to Campbell Street after fourteen years of operation on Mill Street. Other building operations in addition to house construction included erection of the town’s Roman Catholic Church and a bridge by the Gillies Company at the lower falls. The Council Chamber of the Town Hall was vacated to provide additional classroom accommodation for the Town Hall School. A bylaw authorized the raising of $6,000 to buy a new fire engine for the Ocean Wave Fire Company.

Electric Lights and Telephones

1885 – A telephone system connecting eastern Ontario centres including Carleton Place was established by the Bell Telephone Company. Twenty telephones were installed in this town in the first year, all for business purposes.

A direct current electric lighting system was installed here by the Ball Electric Light Company of Toronto, including five street lights on Bridge Street. The generator was placed by the Gillies firm at the Central Machine Works. It was moved in the following year to a new waterpower installation opposite the west side of the Gillies woollen mill.

On Mill Street a four storey stone mill was built by Horace Brown, joined by a grain elevator to his former flour mill, and was equipped for the new roller process of flour milling.

Working hours for the winter season at the woollen mill of Gillies & Son & Company were from 7 a.m. to 6.15 p.m. with closing time one hour earlier on Saturdays.

Junction Town

1886 – The railway junction and divisional town of Carleton Place was a stopping point for the first through train of the C.P.R. to reach the west coast from Montreal.

The new tannery of John F. Cram and Donald Munroe was destroyed in a fire loss of over $10,000.

Abner Nichols’ planing mill was built at the corner of Lake Avenue and Bridge Street.

Indians who had camped for the winter at Franktown, selling baskets through the district, struck their tents and returned to the St. Regis Reserve.

The May 24th holiday was celebrated by a sports day at Allan’s Point (Lake Park). Its baseball score was Carleton Place Athletics 16, Renfrew 5 ; and a no score lacrosse game was played between Ottawa Metropolitans and Carleton Place. The practice field for the lacrosse and cricket clubs at this time was the picnic grounds of Gillies Grove below the woollen mill.

Canada Lumber Company

1887 – Peter McLaren sold his lumber mill properties at Carleton Place and upper Mississippi timber limits at a price reported as $900,000. The buyers, the McLarens of Buckingham and Edwards of Rockland, formed the Canada Lumber Company. It doubled the mills capacity, with Alexander H. Edwards (1848-1933) as manager here. Peter McLaren three years later was appointed to the Senate, and died at age 88 at Perth in 1919.

St. Andrews Presbyterian Church was built on its present Bridge Street site donated by James Gillies, the congregation vacating its previous location in the old stone church building still standing at the corner of William and St. Paul Streets.

A bridge of ironwork on stone piers replaced the wooden bridge across the Mississippi at Bridge Street. A brick and tile manufacturing yard, which operated for about fifteen years, was opened by William Taylor, hardware merchant. A large brick manufacturing business of William Willoughby, building contractor, continued in operation. The Herald office and plant moved to a new brick building at the south side of the site of the present Post Office. A Masonic Temple was built, and a considerable number of residential and other buildings.

Reduced railway fares were granted for the fifth annual musical convention and choral festival of the Carleton Place Mechanics Institute, held in the drill hall at the market square, with guest performers from Boston, Toronto and other points. The Institute’s officers included William Pattie, Dr. R. F. Robertson, Alex C. McLean and John A. Goth.

The completion of a hundred years of railway transportation provides Lanark County with a notable centennial reached in 1959. The railway which brought this revolutionary change to the country’s way of life was the line from Brockville. It was one of Canada’s early railways, and the second in the Ottawa Valley.

Canada’s first great railway building decade came in the 1850’s. Its removal of dependence of trade and travel upon the limitations of the horse and the boat soon was gained by Lanark County’s population centres of Smiths Falls, Perth, Carleton Place and Almonte. After construction began in 1853, a railway was placed in operation a hundred years ago connecting these and intervening points with the recently built Grand Trunk Railway and the St. Lawrence River at Brockville.

Accomplishment of this stage of the second railway designed to tap the timber resources of the Ottawa Valley was achieved during an international business depression. Recurring and seemingly fatal financial obstacles delayed construction. Repeated commitments of capital assistance to the United Kingdom promoters and contractors by the united counties of Lanark and Renfrew were found necessary. Four years earlier the Valley had been approached by its first railway when a line began operating in April, 1855, between Prescott and Ottawa. It remained the only railway service of the nation’s political and lumber capital until the line between Ottawa and Carleton Place was put in use in 1870.

The struggling railway line from Brockville reached its second objective within a few years when, in 1864, it reached the Ottawa River by extension from Almonte to Arnprior and Sand Point. It operated under the name of the Brockville & Ottawa Railway Company. Associated with the Canada Central Railway Company, which obtained a charter in 1861 and nine years later completed the line from Carleton Place to Ottawa, its construction was continued north through Renfrew County in the 1870’s. On approaching its ultimate northern terminus near North Bay it was united in 1881 with the forthcoming transcontinental venture of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.

Stuck in the Mud

Local canal proposals and plank road projects of the 1850’s soon were forgotten in the prospects of railway transportation, advanced by the cry of “Stuck in the Mud” – the question of how much longer there could be toleration of being almost completely locked in by bad roads for six months out of twelve. The Brockville and Ottawa Railway Company’s charter of 1853 authorized building of a line from Brockville “to some point on the Ottawa River”, and a branch line from Smiths Falls to Perth. By August the company was reported to have let a first contract to James Sykes and Company of Sheffield for building and equipping the line as far as Pembroke at a cost of 930,000 pounds, and to have received subscriptions for about a third of this amount, in shares of 5 pounds each. The County Council of Lanark and Renfrew in January, 1854, was notified that its bylaw to loan up to 200,000 pounds to the Brockville and Ottawa Railway Company had been approved by the provincial government.

Sub-contractors were at work in the spring of 1854 at points between Carleton Place, Smiths Falls, Perth and Brockville. Reverses which delayed the project culminated in the North American financial crash of 1857, when Messrs. Dale and Ellerman and Sir Charles Fox soon appeared before Lanark and Renfrew’s County Council seeking renewed municipal financial aid. Further contracts for continuing construction finally were arranged before the end of the year.

Open For Business

In a premature and unpromising official opening of the sourthern section of the line early in 1859, a wood-burning locomotive with two coaches filled with passengers had left Brockville on a bitterly cold midwinter day. At a safe speed of less than fifteen miles an hour Smiths Falls was reached in two hours. The troubles of the inaugural run came in continuing over the twelve icy miles of branch line between Smiths Falls and Perth. For a broken coupling between the two passenger coaches, repairs were made with a rope. Much time was spent in rural searches for water to replenish the supply for the engine. In this way the crew and passengers spent seven and three quarter hours in a sub-zero journey of twelve miles from Smiths Falls to the branch line’s terminus at Perth.

The Iron Horse

For Carleton Place the great day of 1859 arrived on June 21. In recording it James Poole, editor of the Carleton Place Herald, said :

“A passenger train left here on Tuesday last for Perth, taking a number of members of the County Council, who are now in session, and several of our citizens who were anxious to get a ‘ride on the rail’.

We have to congratulate the inhabitants of this village and the adjoining townships upon the arrival of the iron horse in our midst. It is somewhat refreshing to hear the old fellow whistle, as he passes and repasses several times a day with his heavy load of iron and gravel. The bridge on the Mississippi was passed over on Monday last for the first time, and was found to be perfectly secure. Although tried several times in succession with a train heavily loaded with iron, the centre of the long span was found, by a guage, to not settle down more than about half an inch. The contractors, Messrs. Scrimger and Farrell, deserve great credit for the substantial and workmanlike manner in which they have performed their contract…….The timber for the bridge had to be floated down from Caldwell’s mill at Lanark.

The depot is nearly finished and will be ready for the reception of freight in a few days. Mr. Thomas Hughes, the station master, has arrived and is about entering on his duties. We are sorry to hear that the funds are running short, and that the supply of material on hand will not be sufficient to push the road much beyond Almonte. Something should be done to carry it through to Arnprior as soon as possible and secure the trade of the Ottawa, without which the road can scarcely be expected to pay. The matter will be brought before the County Council at its present sitting.

So far as our own village is concerned we have the railway now. The lead mine is doing well and giving employment to a large number of hands. Some of the land holders there are laying out their property in village lots and offering them for sale. If the water power, now running to waste, was in the hands of some enterprising person who would erect factories and mills we might reasonably expect that the place would prosper.”

A week later he added with regret:

“We learn that nothing was done at the late meeting of the County Council to assist in extending our Railway to the Ottawa. There still remains, we believe, at the disposal of the Council a balance of the Municipal Loan Fund amounting to about $10,000, which would have gone very far towards completing the road to Pakenham or Arnprior, because it is graded nearly the whole distance, the ties are on hand and the iron on hand. To lay the track and finish the bridges at Almonte and Pakenham, both of which are pretty well advanced, would not have cost a very large sum.

The first Carleton Place Common School was replaced at the same Bridge Street site, by the original form of the present Central School in 1870. The old school was enlarged in 1850 as described by James Poole in volume I of the Carleton Place Herald :

“Our school house has been improved during the past year by erection of an addition some fifty feet in length. The school house is now in the form of a letter T, with a front of fifty feet to the street and measuring 48 feet from front to rear at the widest part, the wings being 24 feet wide. It is so arranged that the whole can be under the eye of one teacher, or if desirable a part of it can be shut off with folding doors and used either as a female school or as a juvenile department to the male school.

The building committee intends to have a porico put up. Outhouses have been erected and the whole ground, about a third of an acre, has been neatly enclosed with a good substantial fence. It only remains to have the building painted and a few trees set out in the grounds to make it everything that can be desired as a village school house.

Yearly rates payable for cheap education by an efficient teacher in the new school were advertised by the trustees of Beckwith school section No. 11, after the school had remained vacant for a few months in 1852 for want of a teacher.

Private classes offering tuition for young ladies also opened at this time in Carleton Place when in 1851 a Miss Roy opened a day school, quoting rates of 4 pounds per year for English only and 6 pounds for English, Music, French and Drawing. Miss Margaret Bell also announced a school for young ladies to be opened by her at her mother’s home. Several years later she was the teacher of the local community school.

Grammar School

The first high school facilities in Carleton Place were provided in about 1852. Their establishment accompanied appointment by the Governor General of town residents – Robert Bell, James Duncan and James Rosamond as associate members of the Board of Trustees for superintending grammar schools in the united counties of Lanark and Renfrew. Peter McLaren, when teacher of the Carleton Place Grammar School, obtained his Queen’s College B.A. Degree in 1853. The common school board and the high or grammar school trustees were united, about this time, as they continued to be for many years. The pupils of both schools shared the same building. Samuel G. Cram (1838-1915), son of David Cram of Beckwith, was later head of the old Grammar School.

Quarterly examinations exercises, reported to be so neglected by parents in 1848, were found commanding parental attendance at Carleton Place twelve years later, as told in James Poole’s press reports of midsummer and year-end school exercises here :

An examination of the pupils of the Union Grammar and Common School at Carleton Place, under the charge of F. S. Haight, M.A., took place on July 19, 1860, previous to the summer vacation. The forenoon was devoted to the examination of the several classes in reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, with French, Latin, geometry, etc. In the evening essays and other compositions were read, and addresses delivered, by some of the more advanced scholars. The spectators now amounted to several hundreds. Pieces of music were performed by the scholars. We noted the essays on Scotland, Mahomet, Astronomy and Education as being particularly worthy. The exercises were closed with an address by Rev. W. C. Clarke of Lanark.”

Christmas Party

An account of the year-end school exercises of the same year tells of the first community Christmas party in Carleton Place to be placed on public record :

“The Carleton Place Union Grammar and Common School closed its fourth term for 1860 on December 22nd, and was examined by Rev. John McKinnon. Grammar school prizes were awarded in arithmetic, spelling and composition, grammar and three classes of geography. On the evening of December 24th the teacher and senior pupils gave a soiree to the inhabitants of the Section.

The spacious school house, which has recently been thoroughly repaired, was beautifully decorated with evergreens and flowers and lighted up with a great variety of candles and coloured lamps. Vocal and instrumental music enlivened the scene. It gives us great pleasure to state that music is cultivated in this school to a greater extent than any other school with which we are acquainted.

Robert Bell Esq., M.P.P. Presided and Rev. Mr. McKinnon opened with prayer. Orations and addresses in different languages were delivered by some of the senior pupils which did them great credit. We give a list of the most prominent, viz., David Duff, Salutory ; Rufus Teskey, Greek oration ; Wm. Sinclair, English oration for abolition of capital punishment ; Josiah Jones Bell, 1845-1931, French oration ; John M. Sinclair, 1842-1926, English oration, on evils of intemperance ; D. McKinnon, Latin oration.

Some pieces of composition by the female pupils were then read by Miss H. Halcroft which showed that the young women attending the school were determined not to be distanced by their male competitors. A presentation of an elegant writing desk was made by the senior class of boys to the teacher, F. S. Haight, M.A. The evening’s entertainment closed with an excellent address to the pupils by Rev. John McMorine, ‘God Save the Queen’, and benediction by Rev. Mr. Halcroft.

On Tuesday evening the scholars, parents and trustees were again invited to the school house, which was well lighted up. In the centre stood a Christmas tree, twinkling with wax tapers and loaded with useful and ornamental articles in endless variety. Every pupil plucked some of this fruit, and seemed to be delighted with the proceedings.”

The state of schools and school teaching in Ontario’s early days has long been a favourite topic in oldtimers’ tales of life in the past century.

Before the Canadian union of 1841 and for sometime after, ability to read and write and to do more than elementary calculation by numbers was beyond the reach of many citizens, both natives and immigrants, unless obtained by home training. A grammar school or high school education was for the few, mainly a rare few with the opportunity and wish to prepare for a life in one of the learned professions. The widespread existence of tax-supported public schools in the province has a record extending back little more than a hundred years.

Among the reforms of the 1840’s and 1850’s was a slowly growing common school system, fathered mainly by the native-born Rev. Dr. Egerton Ryerson, Methodist minister, first head of Victoria College, Cobourg, and from 1844 to 1876 Superintendent of Education for Ontario. Admission to a large share of the province’s public schools remained subject to payment of school rates or fees which not all parents were prepared to pay.

For the so-called Free Schools the part of operating costs not met from county and provincial taxes were raised by ordinary local property taxes instead of by rate-bill admission fees. Free schools increased in number only after overcoming strong opposition in many districts. Compulsory school attendance remained a remote idea. Men with ideas ahead of their time, as James Poole showed in his Carleton Place newspaper of the early 1850’s could be friends of education and enemies of the free schools.

Teachers Salaries Under $200

In Lanark County tax-supported schools had increased in number to 91 by 185?, and teachers to 102, thirteen of which were women teachers. Only five of the county’s schools were free schools. Teachers average yearly salaries including board were about 40 pounds for men and 30 pounds for women, and about 10 pounds less excluding board. Fourteen of the county’s schools were good or first class schools, as graded in inspections of 1850. The rest were equally divided between second class and inferior or third class schools.

The schools of Lanark and Renfrew counties of this time are pictured by the Rev. James Padfield, rector of the Church of England at Franktown, in an 1848 report to the Bathurst District Council in his capacity of superintendent of common schools of the united counties. He found 120 schools in operation under the Common School Act in the two counties, all but a few of which had been inspected by him in the preceding fall and winter.

Teachers of schools selected by Mr. Padfield for commendation were Mr. Warren, then of McNab township, Mr. Hammond of Lanark township, Mr. McDougall of North Sherbrooke, Mr. Morrison of Perth, Mr. Heely of Carleton Place, James Poole and Mr. York of Ramsay, Mr. McDougall and Mr. Lindsay of Beckwith, and Thomas Poole of Pakenham.

Log Schools

Mr. Padfield provides an eye witness summary of the nature of this district’s pioneer schools :

“The Schools in general are better attended from the middle of November to the end of April. Among the pupils may often be found many young persons, both male and female, from 15 to 20 years of age and upwards. During the other six and a half months the older pupils are kept at home to assist their parents in agricultural employments. The Schools then are practically deserted, having frequently and in almost every township not more than ten or twelve scholars in regular attendance in a school, often fewer.

This interferes in a most disastrous way with the education of the young.

The School Houses throughout the District are for the most part built of logs, not more that twenty feet square and seldom eight feet high. Many are much smaller and of less height. In each of these are crowded during the winter months from twenty-five to forty children. The interior arrangements are often very defective. Many are quite unfit for schools.

Among the few good and tolerably commodious school houses in the District may be mentioned one on the south side of Perth and another under construction in Perth, both frame buildings. Another in Smiths Falls, built of stone, if finished bould be the best in the District. But it is suffered to remain in an unfinished state and a high rent is paid for a miserable building in which the school is kept. There are also a few good log school houses in some of the townships, including two in Bathurst, three or four in Beckwith, a very good one at Westmeath and another at Pembroke. Of the rest many are two small and some few are ill built and worse finished, exhibiting loose and shattered floors, broken windows, ill-constructed desks, unsafe stoves and stove pipes and unplasterd walls.

A greater uniformity in textbooks is beginning to prevail. I recollect visiting one School last winter at which fifteen children were present, no two of whom had books of the same kind. The quarterly examinations have been almost a dead letter. In many instances not a single person has been present to show the least interest in the advancement made by the scholars, except perhaps a solitary Trustee. On the whole in spite of these various hinderences our Common Schools are undoubtedly improving. (Signed) J. Padfield, S.C.S. Bathurst District, 2 October, 1848.”

Of ten new school houses completed in the district in the following six months, as noted in Mr. Padfield’s next inspection report, one in Perth was “a commodious frame building divided into two apartments, one for boys and the other for girls”, three were log schools in Montague, one a 22 foot square log school in No. 18 Drummond, and one in Beckwith at Franktown, described as a substantial stone building. It appears the latter building is still standing at Franktown, though not in school use. At Franktown and No. 14 Montague the previous schools had been destroyed by fire.

Teachers Convention, 1842

School teachers meetings at Perth and Carleton Place in 1842 were the first general conventions of this District held following enactment of the Canadian school statute.

At Perth the superintendent of Education for Canada West, Mr. Murray, had recommended to an August gathering of teachers of the two counties that they select a committee to suggest improvements to the new Common School Bill. The committee, consisting of one teacher, from each of the townships of Bathurst, Beckwith, Burgess, Drummond, Horton, McNab, Pakenham and Ramsay, met at John McEwen’s inn at Carleton Place a month later.

Its recommendations, compiled by a subcommittee of three teachers (Thomas Ferguson of the Derry School, Beckwith, J. Fowler of Bathurst and Mr. Kerr of Ramsay), favoured “a union of Townships for the proper forming of School Districts, and that the Commissioner in whose Township the school is located manage the same.” Other recommendations were that no teachers lacking specified qualifications be employed, and that teachers salaries be not less than 50 pounds per year, payable half yearly.

First Local Schools

Carleton Place, like other points in the district, opened its first school with its first growth of settlement. A log hut near the corner of Bridge Street and the Town Line road is said to have become the first local school in 1825, with James Kent as teacher. William Poole, father of the town’s future newspaper editor, taught here from his arrival in 1831 to his death in 1844.

A second school in a frame building in the south side of the village was aquired and enlarged by the Common School Board when the Schools Act and municipal system of 1841 became effective. The bylaw passed for this purpose at the first session of the newly established District Council was introduced by Robert Bell. It provided for a 50 pound assessment upon the inhabitants of Beckwith School Section No. 11 to erect a school house at Carleton Place.

Best known early teacher of the Carleton Place common school probably was Johnston Neilson (1798-1857). Trained in colleges of Belfast and Glasgow, he taught here until 1851, retired on pension while teaching at Pakenham and died at Perth. His somewhat biassed strictures on the manners of the youth of his time in Carleton Place, recorded in newspaper correspondence, have since been given more publicity than might be deserved. A longer lived pioneer local teacher was Peter Comrie, (1819-1901), who came from Comrie, Perthshire, in 1836 and was a teacher living in Carleton Place in 1842. He is said to have maintained a school house for some years on High street near Bridge Street and to have taught in the Carleton Place grammar school.

A Carleton Place newspaper editorial of the late 1850’s offered a brief and effective tribute to the province’s schoolteachers of that day :

“The telegraph and steam engine are powerful civilizers. The printing press is almost invincible in eradicating ignorance and chasing away superstition. But there is a power among us doing for us a greater service. It will be found in small, low roofed, ill ventilated scantily furnished and generally neglected houses, at the crossroads and in public places, here and there, throughout the whole country. He who directs it has many difficulties.

Scanty remuneration is doled out to him, probably months after it is honestly due. Nevertheless the improved facilities for learning today should be contrasted with those of pupils whose lot was cast in days when the dreaded ferule and the awful birch reigned triumphant as the alternate sceptres in the grasp of a tyrant.”

Six hundred adults and children lived in Carleton Place an even one hundred years ago, as estimated for a Canada business directory of November, 1857. Among its business and professional listings of some forty names, the village’s small industrial plants were the sawmill of Bell and Rosamond, Hugh Bolton’s grist mill, Sam Fuller’s foundry and machine shop, and Allan McDonald’s carding mill.

In the woodworking trades were Wm. Bell’s cabinet shop, John Graham’s and George McPherson’s carriage shops, the cooperage works of Edmund Burke and of Francis Lavallee, and carpenters including James Dunlop, Robert McLaren, John McLauchlin and George McLean. Representing the leather trades here in 1857 were the shoemaking businesses of Joseph Bond, Horatio Nelson Dorcherty, Wm. Moore, James Morphy, Wm. Neelin, the saddlery of A. R. Cameron and a tannery.

Fellow tradesmen carrying on metalworking businesses were blacksmiths James Duncan, Richard Gilhully, Duncan McGregor, Nathanial McNeely and tinsmith David Ward. The general retail stores were those of Campbell & Morphy (in which the post office located, at the corner of Bridge and Bell Streets), John Dewar, Archibald McArthur (corner of Bridge and Mill Streets), Wm. Peden and Tennant & Struthers.

Carleton Place’s merchant tailors of a century ago were Patrick Galvin, Colin Sinclair and Walter Scott ; innkeepers were Napoleon Lavallee and Robert Metcalf, and James McDiarmid was an auctioneer. Robert Bell, M.P.P., among his other business interests, had agencies for fire and life insurance and for marriage licences. Editor of the weekly Herald, James Poole, also was Clerk of the Division Court. Clergymen of the local churches were the Revs. R. Gregory Cox, Church of England ; W. Denion, Baptist ; Peter Gray, Presbyterian Free Church ; and John Howes, Wesleyan Methodist. The physician and surgeon was Dr. Wm. Wilson.

In Almonte were three sawmills, Shipman’s and Wylie’s grist mills, and McIntosh’s and Rosamond’s Woollen Mills, the latter newly moved from Carleton Place.

At and near Lanark were the Caldwell sawmills, the grist, saw and carding mills of John Gillies and of W. Drummond, and the Dobbie foundry. At Ennisville the growth of factory operations was centred on the Code cloth factory and James Ennis’ saw and grist mill.

Ashton had two sawmills, Franktown two medical doctors. The grist and saw mills at Clayton were owned by Edward Bellamy and the carding mill by Timothy Blair. Appleton had Peter and John F. Cram’s tannery, Joseph Teskey’s grist mill and Robert Teskey’s sawmill.

In 1857 and continuing for many later decades, the manufacturing trades best represented in practically all centres of population in Lanark County, as elsewhere in the province, included also the blacksmiths, and the wagon makers, the tailors and shoemakers, the coopers and the cabinet makers. Payment for their goods and services might be made in produce or in cash. These classes of tradesmen and others all helped to provide locally for a great share of the average family needs.

Early days in Carleton Place 100 years ago, prepared by Howard M. Brown

DECIMAL CURRENCY

We publish in our advertising columns a notice from the banks of Canadaviz.

Bank of Montreal, Bank of North America, Bank of Upper Canada, City Bank, Quebec Bank, Gore Bank, La Banque du Peuple, Molson’s Bank, Bank of Toronto, Niagara District Bank. They announce their intention of adopting, after January 1st next, a decimal system of currency or dollars and cents in their accounts. The course is rendered necessary by the Act of the last session which makes it incumbent on the Government to use that currency in their books. The banks require their customers to draw their notes for discount, which are to fall due on and after January 1st, 1858, in dollars and cents and to have their cheque books, etc., for use after that date prepared conformably to the new regulations.

We publish the following letter on the need for this development. Sir: Canada with her 2 ½ or 3 million people presents the curious anomaly of a nation without a currency, the only approach to which are the coppers issued by the banks. One gets a handful of silver and on looking it over presents the appearance of the plunder of numismatic collection. I once found the following assortment in a handful so received – a Prussian Thaler, a Roman Paulo, a French Franc and half Franc, some Spanish, Mexican, Portugese and Sardinian pieces, one Swedish coin, a few English shillings, and various United States fractions of a dollar. The Province stands committed to the decimal system and sooner or later all commercial accounts will be so kept. I would suggest the postage stamps should carry their value marked in cents instead of pence. The banks might also be authorized to issue silver tokens representing 5, 10 and 25 cents. The disintegration of the British empire would not be hastened by granting the Canadians a decimal coinage.

AGRICULTURAL PICNIC

In consequence of the inclemency of the weather the Pic Nic or Outdoor Soiree in connection with the United Counties of Lanark and Renfrew Agricultural Society is postponed to Tuesday, July 7th, when it will take place in Mrs. Thomas Morphy’s woods, Carleton Place, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Tickets 1s.3d each. Robert Bell, Secretary and Treasurer.

THE ORANGE WALK

So long back as we can remember it has been usual to make a fuss, kick up a dust and drink a little whiskey to wash it down, on the 12th of July, in commemoration of the battle of the Boyne. That memorable day happening on Sunday this year, the 13th was duly ushered in by the discharge of musketry and the roll of the Protestant drum. It was a scorching hot day but the Orange men, Orange women, Orange boys and Orange girls from all parts of the country met in our village and had a general parade. Upwards of 2,000 persons were present. All seemed to enjoy themselves most admirably until evening, when the assembly quietly broke up and several lodges returned to their respective homes.

LATE REV. WM. BELL

Died at Perth, on Sabbath morning, August 16th, 1857, the Rev. William Bell, A.M., the Minister of the first Presbyterian Church, in the 78th year of his age and the 41st of his ministry. He arrived at Perth as the minister of the first Presbyterian settlers in June 1817. He had the honor of being the first to preach the gospel in Lanark, Ramsay, Beckwith, Smiths Falls, and other places, besides Perth, at all of which there are now flourishing congregations.

BUILDING A TOWN HALL

A special meeting of the Municipal Council of the Township of Beckwith was held at Mr. Lavallee’s Hotel, Carleton Place, on Tuesday July 28th at 11 o’clock a.m., for the purpose of receiving tenders for the building of a Town Hall for the said township. Mr. Brice McNeely moved, seconded by John Roberts, that the Council do purchase a site or certain piece of ground for the purpose of erecting a Town Hall for the benefit of the Township of Beckwith said parcel of land being part of the east half of lot 14 in the 8th concession of Beckwith on the Franktown and Carleton Place road. The five tenders were opened as received from Neil Stewart, Robert Metcalfe, Robert McLaren, Peter Campbell and Wm. Rorrison. A contract was then entered into by the Council with the lowest tenderer, Neil Stewart and securities, for the building of a Town Hall for the sum of 119 pounds, 10 shillings, the job to be finished by January 1st, 1858.

INNISVILLE CHURCH

Proposals will be received until October 10th for plastering and shingling the Church of St. John, in the 12th concession of Lanark, and for building a small vestry room thereto. A. Code, James Cooke, George Crampton, church-wardens, committee. Carleton Place September 30th, 1857.

GRAND SQUIRREL HUNT

A grand squirrel hunt will take place at Carleton Place on Monday, October 19th, 1857. Parties wishing to attend the same can do so by leaving their names at the Post Office and paying the fee. Wm. Morphy, Secretary.

SCHOOL ON SATURDAYS

From the (Ottawa) Citizen. That hardly a half of the usual number of pupils attend on Saturdays is a powerful reason why the schools should be closed on that day. All Grammer Schools are closed on Saturdays. The children attending the Common Schools are certainly as much and even more in need of recreation than those attending the former, since they are generally younger. There are some who argue that since the parents toil six days so the child ought.

FINANCIAL CRASH

The financial panic in the States which has increased week after week since the first of September has culminated. It commenced by the breaking down of the Ohio Life Insurance Company in August. Then came the crash in the South and the West, the suspension of all the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and the Washington Banks. Rhode Island followed next, and all over New England the doors were closed. New York City and State stood out to the last, but the failure of some of the heaviest mercantile houses has been followed by a total suspension of specie payments by the entire fifty-one banks of the City, and a solid column of leading merchants, manufacturers and publishers has been driven to the wall.

BECKWITH TOWN HALL

In going to Franktown yesterday we noticed that the Town Hall which was lately erected for this township is about completed. It is a good sized frame building situated in a fine airy place on the hill opposite the Free Church. We understand Mr. John Roberts was so liberal as to make the township a present of the site for the building.